Released: September 19, 2025
By album eleven, the Headstones know how to start a fight. Burn All the Ships begins by making us wait. “Put That Car in Drive” opens on light drums, palm-muted guitar, and Hugh Dillon singing below his usual bark. The band builds in small steps, holding back the full hit until the song has pulled us into its story of hard lessons and movement as survival.
That opening raises the question running through the record: can the Headstones slow the room down and still make it dangerous?
“Decades” tests the idea by jerking between speeds. Jesse Labovitz’s tight, boxed-in drums snap beneath verses that Dillon drives through clenched teeth. Then the chorus drops into a slower gear so abruptly that the song nearly stalls. His voice falls into a lower register as the rhythm disappears beneath him. The track runs less than three minutes, yet every stop makes it seem longer. Time becomes part of the arrangement.
“Daylight Lightning” holds the tension differently. Trent Carr lets guitar notes blur under reverb while the rhythm holds back a clean release. Dillon sounds stunned by the life-changing news inside the lyric, as if he is still trying to understand what happened. “An Effort to Forget” moves faster, but Emily Haines changes the vocal shape of the song. Her clear phrasing cuts across Dillon’s scraped delivery, while the pedal steel curling around them adds an uneasy country edge. She makes his roughness easier to hear.
“City of Ghosts” works the album title into an uncomfortable question: if you destroy every escape route, do you also lose part of yourself? At 4:23, it is the longest song here, giving the chorus enough room to open, collapse, and return. The final section circles around the need to separate useful information from the surrounding noise. Dillon repeats the thought until it sounds less like an answer than something he needs to believe.
That uncertainty follows the band into the faster material. “Details” begins with Carr’s guitar twisting through Tim White’s bass line before Labovitz enters and kicks the song forward. Dillon’s words bunch up, stutter, and double back as the meter shifts underneath him. Every time the song settles, the rhythm section yanks the floor away again. It has the speed of an older Headstones song, but its real hook is how often the band interrupts that speed.
Dallas Green gives “Navigate” more melodic room. His high harmonies sit above Dillon, and his bridge pulls the song toward City and Colour while the guitars remain coarse underneath. Green’s voice gives Dillon something new to scrape against. “Unnatural Causes” moves further sideways, returning to the dub pulse the Headstones explored on Nickels for Your Nightmares. White’s bass draws the outline while reverb floods the open space. Producers Chris Osti and Dillon keep the instruments clearly separated, and Dillon lowers his voice enough to let the groove lead.
“Damned” ends with acoustic guitar and low piano as Dillon counts burned bridges, lost games, and details remembered too late. The arrangement offers no sweeping resolution. The bill simply comes due.
So, can the Headstones slow the room down and still make it dangerous? They can. The threat on Burn All the Ships often comes from the pause before the drums return, the clean voice beside Dillon’s rasp, or the silence surrounding a bass line. The band still knows how to lunge. Its sharpest moments here come when the Headstones stand still and make silence part of the threat.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
© 2026 DeadNoteMedia. All rights reserved.
DeadNoteMedia 